For Customers

2,000 Portrait Customers Can’t Be Wrong

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I’ve shot at least two thousand portraits over the past thirty-three years. Business portraits, environmental portraits, editorial portraits, magazine portraits, author and writer portraits, political campaign portraits, athlete and team portraits, headshots for actors, models and musicians, some family, children and pet portraits, a couple dozen prom portraits, a handful of bride and groom portraits and two maternity portraits.

Toronto Maple Leafs captain Mats Sundin (L) and goaltender Curtis Joseph pose together for a poster in 1999.

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It’s the photographer not the price

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If you’re about to hire a photographer, remember that you get what you pay for. Low price always gets you low quality.

Business headshots never cost anywhere near $15 each no matter what the volume. Expect *at least* quadruple that amount for a high volume shoot with minimal editing.

When you hire a photographer, you’re paying for both the photography and the photographer. The experience and quality of the photographer directly affects the success of the photos. Photos do not create themselves.

If one professional is saying they will do the work for $100 per hour and another is quoting you $200 per hour, your instinct shouldn’t immediately jump to the one offering the lowest price.

As an example, maybe the higher-priced solution has the learnings from a 20 year career vs. a 5 year career, to help you avoid more known pitfalls that you don’t even see coming. Or, they have helped 20 clients succeed in similar situations, vs. 2 clients succeed . . .

– George Deeb, Forbes

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Campaigning for Attention

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Ontario has a provincial election in two weeks. But this election seems to have far fewer lawn signs and billboards than in the past. Many (most?) campaign signs don’t have a picture of the candidate.

Perhaps having fewer campaign posters is a result of cost-cutting. Fewer lawn signs and billboards but a lot more robocalls. Or maybe candidates are relying more on social media.

Why don’t all candidates use a business portrait of themselves? Is this also because of cost? A sign with a colour photo requires four-colour printing but a plain lawn sign is usually just a single spot colour. Or maybe people don’t vote for a candidate but rather they vote for a political party so a business headshot might seem unnecessary.

But not using a candidate headshot is an odd place to cut costs. Many studies over the past 35 years have proven that a good headshot will earn more votes. The lack of a business headshot also greatly reduces the amount of attention a candidate (and their lawns signs) will get.
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Fixing the Payfirma for WooCommerce Plugin

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This post is only for those who use WooCommerce as their eCommerce platform and Payfirma as their credit card processor. This means that 99.9999% of you can stop reading right now.

The Payfirma plugin (currently version 2.6) for WooCommerce isn’t fully compatible with WooCommerce 3.x and Payfirma has said it has no plans to update it. So if you’re tired of the plugin generating a ton of php errors, here’s the solution that will take just a couple minutes of your time.

In the Payfirma_Woo_Gateway plugin, go to class > class.payfirma.php and scroll down to about line 508. Look for the block of code that reads:
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Reach for the Top

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A job search engine company published its annual list of top Canadian employers. A printed version was inserted in today’s The Globe and Mail newspaper.

Not all of the selected top employers were profiled in the (online and printed) magazine. But by some strange coincidence, every company that was profiled just happened to have a paid ad in the publication.

If you flip through the magazine, you can tell which companies hired professional photographers and which decided to go with, uh, “other” photographers.

You will notice an awful lot of group pictures showing people doing nothing but standing or sitting around. There are also a number of photos that most professional photographers would’ve deleted. To be fair, there is one good group photo and several other acceptable images.
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Selfie Science

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A scientific study released a few days ago confirmed what every portrait photographer has known forever:

If you take a picture of someone from very close up, it will distort their facial features.

This fact is not well known by people who take selfies which, apparently, is the number one cause of distorted faces. Some of these folks are going to plastic surgeons and requesting surgery to correct their distorted facial appearance.

Boris Paskhover, an assistant professor at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School’s Department of Otolaryngology who specializes in facial plastic and reconstructive surgery, frequently was shown selfies as examples of why patients were requesting surgery to make their noses smaller.

Researchers have named this horrible disfiguring issue as . . . wait for it . . . “The Selfie Effect.”

Dr. Boris Paskhover worked with the computer science department at Stanford University to develop a mathematical model to explain why noses look bigger when photographed close up.

Their mathematical model determined that most selfies are shot from a distances of about 12 inches. This short distance makes a nose look 30% wider. But, and here’s modern science in action, if a photo is shot from at least five feet away then the nose will look normal.

Researchers concluded that selfies are a public health issue. So please, for the sake of your health, hire a professional portrait photographer for your business headshots and other important portraits. Your nose will thank you.

 

Working With A Photographer

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US author Seth Godin recently wrote a post titled Working with a designer (four paths). Since my web site is about business photography, I will steal adapt Godin’s post:

 

Working with a photographer (four paths)

All of us want to look good online, need some web site photos and maybe even a portrait of ourselves. More and more individuals and companies are learning that they need to hire a professional photographer.

It comes down to doing your homework. Be clear with yourself before you spend a nickel or a minute with a photographer. This difficult internal conversation will save you endless frustration and heartache later.

Here are four postures to consider when working with a good photographer:
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